Bill Pronzini: Camouflage

One more valid reason to legalize and tax the crap out of marijuana and prostitution.

Bryn didn’t look well today. Mild hangover coupled with the bitter melancholy that plagued her. She’d been through so damn much-stroke, disfigurement, abandonment by her husband, custody loss of her son, and now this grim new anguish over Bobby’s well-being. Dark patches showed like stains beneath a layer of makeup under her eyes. She’d put on dark red lipstick, too, to match the scarf tied across the frozen left side of her face-splashes of bright color more for her son’s sake than her own or his, Runyon thought. The red-and-white-checked blouse and green skirt and red ribbon in her ash-blond hair, too.

“Bobby’s in his room,” she said. “I told him you were coming over, but… he doesn’t want to go anywhere. If I let him, he’ll hide in there all weekend.”

“I’ve got an idea. Tell him I’m here and I’d like to talk to him.”

“You won’t get anything out of him here…”

“I know. That’s not how I’m going to handle it.”

Runyon waited in the living room for five minutes. When Bryn came back she said, “All right. But God, he’s still so apathetic. He doesn’t seem to care about anything.”

Bobby’s room was at the rear of the house, opposite her office/workroom. Runyon knocked on the door before he stepped inside. The boy was sitting at a small desk, a laptop computer open in front of him; video game images twitched and jumped on the screen and his attention stayed focused on them. He was a gangly kid, tall for his nine years, his brown hair cut in the current short, spiky fashion that made Runyon think of a patch of grass that needed mowing. He wore Levi’s and a faded red 49ers sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off. There was a soft cast on his fractured left arm.

Runyon stood by the door, waiting. He didn’t want to start this off by pulling adult rank. Bobby was a good kid, shy at the best of times, and generally polite; he wouldn’t let too much time go by before acknowledging his visitor.

He didn’t. Less than a minute. Then, with reluctance, he shifted his gaze from the screen and said, “Hello, Mr. Runyon,” in a small, colorless voice.

“You can call me Jake if you want to.”

“I’m not supposed to call adults by their first names.”

“Not even if the adult says it’s okay?”

“… I don’t know.”

“Your mom wouldn’t mind. We’re good friends, you know.”

“I know.”

“Jake, then, okay?”

Short silence. Then, “I guess so.”

Runyon moved over to where he could see the moving figures on the computer. “What’s that you’re playing?”

“X-Men,” Bobby said. “Children of the Atom.”

“Challenging?”

“I guess so.”

“Bet you’re good at it.”

“Sometimes.” The boy glanced at the screen again, then clicked off. “Not this time,” he said then.

Runyon said, “What I wanted to talk to you about is your mom’s birthday. Coming up pretty soon.”

“Week after next.”

“You have a present for her yet?”

“No. Not yet.”

“Know what you’re going to get her?”

Bobby shook his head. “I can’t think of anything,” he said, and paused, and added, “I don’t get much of an allowance.”

“Well, I’m not sure what to get her, either. I thought maybe you and I could put our heads together, figure out what she’d like.”

The boy squirmed a little, not saying anything.

“Drive over to Stonestown,” Runyon said, “look around in the stores.”

“… I don’t know.”

“Don’t know if you should? I can fix it with your mom.”

Silence. But he was thinking it over.

“I’d really appreciate your help, Bobby. She deserves some nice birthday presents, don’t you think?”

“Yes.” Then, making up his mind, “Okay, if she says I can go.”

“I’ll ask her. Give me a couple of minutes.”

Bryn was in the kitchen, fiddling with the arrangement of canned goods in a small pantry-make-work while she waited. Runyon said, “So far so good. We’re going over to Stonestown, do some shopping.”

“Shopping? How’d you manage that?”

“A little psychology.”

She stepped out of the pantry and shut the door. “You’re good with kids, you know that?”

“Well, I always thought I might be if I had the chance.”

She didn’t comment on that; she knew what he meant. He’d told her the whole bleak story of his relationship, or lack of one, with his son, Joshua. The mistake he’d made in not fighting harder for custody after he’d filed for divorce from Angela; how she’d taken Joshua away to San Francisco, riddled with vindictive hate and driven by the alcohol dependency that eventually killed her, and convinced him as he was growing up that he was a victim of adultery and careless neglect-neither of which was true. Runyon had never had another chance to be a father-Colleen hadn’t been able to have kids-and by the time he’d moved down here from Seattle after Colleen died, it was too late to mend the damage done by Angela’s malicious hatred. Joshua wouldn’t listen to the truth. He’d called on Runyon once professionally, when his lover was a victim of gay-bashing, but refused to have anything to do with his father since. Unbridgeable gap between them.

Bryn put a hand on his arm. “Be careful with him, Jake. He’s very fragile right now.”

“I will.”

“So am I, for that matter. If I didn’t have Bobby… and you…”

“But you do.”

“For now. Sometimes I feel as if I were made of glass. Bump me too hard and I’ll shatter into little pieces.”

“You’re stronger than you think.”

“Am I? I don’t know.” She clutched his arm more tightly. “I can’t stand any more of this. It has to stop before it gets any worse.”

“It will. We’ll put an end to it.”

“One way or another,” she said.

In the car on the way to the Stonestown mall, Bobby sat fiddling with a berry-colored Game Boy. Runyon let the silence go on until they reached Nineteenth Avenue, then began to do a little probing.

“You like living with your dad, Bobby?”

“… I guess so, sure.” But the words were mumbled and unconvincing.

“Spend a lot of time together with him?”

“Not very much. He works all the time, and I have to…”

“Have to what?”

No response.

“What do you do together when he’s not working?”

“Not too much. He’s always tired, or else…”

“Or else?”

No response. The boy’s fingers moved rapidly on his computer toy.

“Does he get angry when he’s tired? Lose his temper?”

No response.

Runyon tried a different tack. “You know, your mom wishes she could see you more often. She really misses you.”

“I know.”

“You miss her, too, right?”

Head bob.

“Then how come you stay in your room, instead of spending time with her?”

Six-beat. Then, “I wish it was like it used to be.”

“Before your dad moved out?”

“Before she had that stroke. We were a family then.”

“The divorce was your dad’s idea. He couldn’t deal with what happened to her face.”

No response.

“It doesn’t make any difference to me. Or to you, right?”

Flying fingers, now. “I don’t want to talk about this stuff anymore, Mr. Runyon.”

“Jake.”

No response. And silence the rest of the way to the mall.

Runyon parked in the galleria’s underground garage. The mall was enclosed, inhabited by dozens of stores, shops, salons, and cafes on two levels-a few of them empty now, victims of the economic recession. He took Bobby into Macy’s, let him wander around looking without making any suggestions.